Hell Island - Matthew Reilly [2]
One Delta team, ever aloof and secretive.
And last of all, one team of Force Reconnaissance Marines.
They shot into the cloud layer—a dense band of dark thunderclouds—freefell through the haze.
Then after nearly a full minute of flying, they burst out of the clouds and emerged in the midst of a full-scale five-alarm ocean storm: rain lashed their facemasks; dark clouds hung low over the heaving ocean; giant waves rolled and crashed.
And through the rain, their target came into view, a tiny island far below them, an island that did not appear on maps anymore, an island with an aircraft carrier parked alongside it.
Hell.
Leading the Marine team was Captain Shane M. Schofield, call-sign ‘Scarecrow’.
Behind his HALO mask, Schofield had a rugged creased face, black hair and blue eyes. Slicing down across those eyes, however, were a pair of hideous vertical scars, one for each eye, wounds from a mission-gone-wrong and the source of his operational nickname. Once on the ground, he’d hide those eyes behind a pair of reflective wraparound anti-flash glasses.
Quiet, intense and when necessary deadly, Schofield had a unique reputation in the Marine Corps. He’d been involved in several missions that remained classified—but the Marine Corps (like any group of human beings) is filled with gossip and rumour. Someone always knew someone who was there, or who saw the medical report, or who cleaned up the aftermath.
The rumours about Schofield were many and varied, and sometimes simply too outrageous to be true.
One: he had been involved in a gigantic multiforce battle in Antarctica, a battle which, it was said, involved a bloody and brutal confrontation with two of America’s allies, France and Britain.
Two: he’d saved the President during an attempted military coup at a remote USAF base. It was said that during that misadventure, the Scarecrow—a former pilot—had flown an experimental space shuttle into low earth orbit, engaged an enemy shuttle, destroyed it, and then come back to earth to rescue the President.
Of course none of this could possibly be verified, and so it remained the stuff of legend; legends, however, that Schofield’s new unit were acutely aware of.
That said, there was one thing about Shane Schofield that they knew to be true: this was his first mission back after a long layover, four months of stress leave, in fact. On this occasion someone really had seen the medical report, and now all of his men on this mission knew about it.
They also knew the cause of his stress leave.
During his last mission out, Schofield had been taken to the very edge of his psychological endurance. Loved ones close to him had been captured . . . and executed. It was even said in hushed whispers that at one point on that mission he had tried to take his own life.
Which was why the other members of his team today were slightly less-than-confident in their leader.
Was he up to this mission? Was he a time-bomb waiting to explode? Was he a basketcase who would lose it at the first sign of trouble?
They were about to find out.
As he shot downward through the sky, Schofield recalled their mission briefing earlier that day.
Their target was Hell Island.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true.
Their target was the ageing supercarrier parked at Hell Island, the USS Nimitz, CVN-68.
The problem: soon after it had arrived at the isolated island to pick up some special cargo, a devastating tsunami had struck from the north and all contact with the Nimitz had been lost.
The oldest of America’s twelve Nimitz-class carriers, the Nimitz had been heading home for decommissioning, with only a skeleton crew of 500 aboard—down from its regular 6,000. Like-wise, its Carrier Battle Group, the cluster of destroyers, subs, supply ships and frigates that normally accompanied it around the globe, had been trimmed to just two cruisers.
Contact with the two escort boats and the island’s communications centre had also been lost.
Unfortunately, the unexpected tidal wave wasn’t the only hostile entity in play here: a North Korean nuclear submarine had